March 11, 2016 From the Archive The Solution By Sharon Olds A new kind of matchmaking. Photo: Marco Verch Sharon Olds’s poem “The Solution” appeared in our Summer 1985 issue. Her most recent collection is Stag’s Leap. Finally they got the Singles problem under control, they made it scientific. They opened huge Sex Centers—you could simply go and state what you want and they would find you someone who wanted that too. You would stand under a sign saying I Like to Be Touched and Held and when someone came and stood under the sign saying I Like to Touch and Hold they would send the two of you off together. Read More
March 11, 2016 On the Shelf Rambling Through Rio, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Kurt Klagsbrunn, Dama acompanhando a corrida no Jockey Clube (detail), Rio de Janeiro, 1945. Image via Aperture/Museu de Arte do Rio Today in zits: if you like to spend your free time watching grotesque pimple-popping sessions on YouTube, you’re not alone. (I may or may not have dedicated an hour to zit vids in the very recent past.) Sandra Lee, a dermatologist, has turned her science into art, posting “extraction” videos and picking up 850,000 subscribers along the way: “Sensing an untapped audience, Lee began posting more videos of things popping from the skin, and her audience gradually grew … Her online fans didn’t seem to mind the ick; in fact, many of them relished it. Some fans reported that their mouths inexplicably watered when they saw a particularly juicy pop; others claimed that they found the videos so soothing that they used them as a sleep aid. Lee began setting videos to punnily titled music, like Duke Ellington’s ‘Just Squeeze Me (But Please Don’t Tease Me).’ ” “Milking the rest of it,” a new poem by Dorothea Lasky, is rich in bodily fluids, too: “Turn the faucet on / Turn the breast on / Emptied completely of milk / With the tiny hoses in a row … ” The photographer Kurt Klagsbrunn captured the people of midcentury Rio as no one else could: as a stranger. Ali Pechman writes—“A Jewish Austrian refugee, he arrived in the city in 1940 and photographed its people and places until 1960, the year the government decamped for Brasília … He took no less than 100,000 photographs of his new city. The austerity of his early pictures quickly gives way to crowded street scenes with a focus on character, whether a trolley fish seller, a carnival samba dancer, or a Carioca walking her dog in Copacabana. A chic young journalist eyes the camera suspiciously as two white-coated waiters dote on her; a grisly greengrocer looks on tiredly from inside his shop … The photographer’s own off-kilter sense of humor is never out of sight.” Today in critical shrugs: a critic shrugs. That critic is Barry Schwabsky, who understands the degree to which his role is in flux: “I have to admit that the critic’s loss of power doesn’t worry me much. I don’t see my job as mainly that of making or breaking artists’ reputations, or of informing collectors or curators what they ought to buy or exhibit. If they don’t listen to me, fine; I have other responsibilities toward art … If there is a crisis in art criticism, it has to do instead with an inner transformation in the nature of art itself. What if art no longer requires a public—that is, someone like the active spectator Duchamp spoke about? That would be a conundrum, for the critic would no longer have a position from which to evaluate art. It’s not impossible, and it’s not even a new idea: Back in 1966, for example, Allan Kaprow called for “the elimination of the audience”—for participation rather than a merely “empathic response.” In recent years, in great part as a result of their revulsion toward the financialization and globalization of art, more and more artists have been taking this idea seriously, avoiding the audience and instead working only with participants, with collaborators and communities.” Meanwhile, in China: everyone is really into this rom-com about a mermaid. It’s called, appropriately enough, The Mermaid, and it’s just become China’s highest-earning film of all time. How, you ask? One word, my friend: environmentalism. “The Mermaid is not pure escapist entertainment. The ills it addresses—environmental pollution and rampant speculation against the backdrop of a widening income gap—are impossible-to-ignore facts of everyday experience for a Chinese audience. The film opens with a montage of documentary-style footage: sludge pouring from factory pipes, oil-smothered animals, dolphins being herded up for slaughter … It serves a cathartic function, providing an anxious Chinese audience with an opportunity to laugh at their daily injustices, pairing an everyday violation with a larger dose of fairy tale, one in which everything will work out in the end.”
March 10, 2016 Look Memento Mori By Dan Piepenbring This painting and below: E. B. Roberts, Series of Salesman Samples for Memorials, 1929, enamel on board, 20″ x 24″. From a series of thirty-three paintings. Images courtesy Ricco/Maresca Gallery. Trawling through eBay recently, I came across a folder of sample funeral cards from the early twentieth century. As near as I can tell, salesmen would roam from funeral home to funeral home peddling these to undertakers, who would in turn press them on bereaved families. They were standard thank-you notes, essentially—“The family of _________ will hold in grateful remembrance your Spiritual Bouquet and kind expression of sympathy”—but unattached to any death in particular, their messages were gauche, even funny. That they were framed in advertising copy didn’t help. Imagine: Someone you love dies, and before you can even pick out the announcement cards, you have to read sentences like “Genuine engraving achieves its inherent beauty from a correlation of width and depth which no other process possesses.” As a character in Terry Southern’s The Loved One says: “Death has become a middle-class business. There’s no future in it.” Read More
March 10, 2016 Our Daily Correspondent Time for Spring By Sadie Stein From To Spring, the season’s all-time creepiest creation story. Though the calendar disagrees, for the past two days it’s been spring in the northeast. Everyone is going wild. Premature sunbathing is rampant. “Spring fever,” an old man winked at me—but then, that’s what I get for sitting on a traffic island in the middle of West Broadway. In 1936, MGM released the “Happy Harmonies” cartoon “To Spring”—a lighthearted celebration of the season, on the face of it. And it is physically beautiful. But as with so many animations of the era, there’s a serious dark side. Read More
March 10, 2016 On Language The Delinquents By M. G. Zimeta The language of debt and ethics. Illustration: Thomas Hosmer Shepherd When E. E. Cummings wrote “i am never without it (anywhere / i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done / by only me is your doing, my darling),” he was talking about a lover, but he may as well have been talking about a debt. For we are wracked with debt, especially with student debt, which last month the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reported to be the second largest household debt category after mortgages. It’s also the debt category with the highest delinquency rate—perhaps because its balances are unpayable, given the way the global economy is stacked against the young. But still creditors wonder: How can they make their debtors pay up? The key may be in asking with the right words, and for the right reasons. Read More
March 10, 2016 On the Shelf Some Unearthly Master, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring William Horton’s illustration in The Savoy No. 7. Via the Public Domain Review. Brad Bigelow thinks of his blog, Neglected Books, as “one little step against entropy.” His reviews of forgotten or obscure books have led, in many cases, to publishers reissuing them, sometimes even in translation: “One of Bigelow’s favorite rediscoveries is Gentleman Overboard, a 1937 novella by Herbert Clyde Lewis, a son of Russian immigrants. Lewis grew up in New York, became a journalist, and eventually wrote Hollywood screenplays. The book’s protagonist is a steamship passenger named Henry Preston Standish, who slips on a spot of oil and tumbles overboard. Gentleman Overboard is a record of his final day and his fading hopes of rescue … The most accessible online edition was scanned from an old library copy, which was last checked out in 1950. That’s the same year that Lewis died, of a heart attack, at the age of forty-one. But Bigelow has saved Gentleman Overboard from going completely underwater: a few years ago, he recommended it to a publisher in Argentina, who decided to release a Spanish translation.” While we’re on forgetting: Yeats wrote that his friend William Horton “has his waking dreams, but more detailed and vivid than mine; and copied them as if they were models posed for him by some unearthly master.” Despite the poet’s praise, few remember Horton’s drawings today—after some early success, his career, as Jon Crabb writes, found him listing toward occultism: “Horton was clearly immersed in the London occult scene during the 1900s, but in 1905 he also finally attracted the attention of The Studio, the era’s foremost journal of design and illustration. The September issue featured several Horton illustrations, which are of a more mature and less ominous style … Sadly, he published little after 1912 and, in 1916, suffered a mental breakdown after the death of his partner Amy Audrey Locke. In 1918, he was hit by a car and further incapacitated. He died in obscurity the following year.” No one does compound words like the Germans do compound works. English speakers can only look on in envy as the Germans chain together nouns—Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän, anyone?—with reckless abandon and effortless precision. Bruce Duncan picks some of his favorites and looks at the grammatical back end: “Both German and English can create compound words out of most parts of speech, not just nouns … My own personal favorite [is] Verschlimmbesserung. This construction doesn’t just present contrasting concepts. It also employs a playful use of German’s grammatical structures to tie them together. The word begins with two verbs—verschlimmern (‘to worsen’) and verbessern (‘to improve’). It then conflates their prefixes (ver-), and adds the suffix (-ung) to turn it into a noun. This process compresses an idea that only a wordy English translation can unpack: “an intended improvement that makes things worse.” If you’re fluent in German, you’ll get more out of Paul Klee’s notebooks—thirty-nine hundred pages of which have just been digitized and released online—than I was able to. Klee used these notes “as the source for his Bauhaus teaching between 1921 and 1931 … His extensively detailed textual theorizing on the mechanics of art (especially the use of color, with which he struggled before returning from a 1914 trip to Tunisia declaring, ‘Color and I are one. I am a painter’) [and] … his copious illustrations of all these observations and principles, in their vividness, clarity, and reflection of a truly active mind, can still captivate anybody—just as his paintings do.” Michael Wood on Orson Welles’s adaptation of Kafka: “It’s not that Welles has ‘a stunning visual intelligence and a numbingly banal view of human experience,’ as Joan Didion thought Fellini and Bergman had; but he does get extraordinary suggestions into his images, and he can become sententious in his words and plots. Welles fans are not enthusiastic about The Trial … But we can see Welles doing something new with his visual machinery in the film, reaching for social meanings of a kind he had not sought before. Welles’s Joseph K is a guilty man and proud of it, because he is not half as guilty as the evil system that closes in on him and kills him … In The Trial more than anywhere else we see how much Welles’s imagination has to do with space. A set for him is a location to be explored, and a location is full of stories.”